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Why Salesforce is Pivoting to CMOs and how that Plays Against Oracle

The new Salesforce Marketing Cloud was announced at Dreamforce last week, which the company said is the world’s only “unified social marketing suite.” For now, the suite is comprised of products from two social media startups acquired this year and last.

Radian6, the leading social media listening platform, was acquired for $326 million in March 2011. Buddy Media, the leading cloud-based CRM provider for social media, was acquired this year for $689 million. The scrappy, successful acquisitions constitute a formidable combination.

Together they give Salesforce a comprehensive social marketing tools arsenal that includes social media monitoring, analysis, tracking, publishing, measuring and advertising. The suite has complete offerings for marketing, sales and support departments and both companies brought with them large pedigree lists of , branded consumer marketing customers.

Few doubt there will be additional acquisitions and new products. But just these two combined entities position Salesforce as the leading enterprise social marketing tools company. Lazerow, in his opening remarks, said marketing was a billion-dollar play for Salesforce. Personally, I think he’s being conservative.

The Marketing Cloud announcement was made at a keynote led by Michael Lazerow, co-founder and CEO of Buddy Media, and Marcel LeBrun, CEO and general manager of Radian6, who are now the twin towers that head up the recently formed Salesforce Marketing unit. They shared a keynote spotlight at last week’s Dreamforce conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center with guest appearances from marketing partners that included Facebook, Ford and Unilever.

It was a snappy presentation that contained just a few newsworthy nuggets. It seemed to me the event was not designed to be a product launch so much as a declaration of position and, in that respect, it succeeded.

The event revealed more about Salesforce corporate strategy than Marketing Cloud product strategy and, more importantly, it revealed the company’s perception of the state of social media in the enterprise, and the evolutionary importance of marketing departments over IT in terms of technology sales.

As he often does, Benioff repeatedly cited Gartner Group’s prediction that, by 2017 the enterprise CMO will spend more money on technology than the IT department. If you believe the forecast, then Benioff is simply following the money and is pivoting his growing company from an IT focus to a marketing focus.

Salesforce is not alone. Oracle has been on a shopping spree this year that has included two impressive social marketing companies, Involver and Vitrue. It is expected to showcase its own comprehensive social marketing solution next week at Oracle OpenWorld, its annual conference for developers and customers, to be held in the same Moscone Center Dreamforce took over last week.

But there’s an interesting juxtaposition between the two companies: While Salesforce has historically been the scrappy underdog against its larger rival, Salesforce is also perceived to be culturally more aligned with the rapidly expanding cloud-based world of social marketers.

Confided a veteran journalist who has long-followed both companies, “Salesforce began during the dotcom boom. It began as an Internet company and it’s culturally already in the cloud. The cultural heart of Oracle remains in the software stacks where it has dominated.”

Changing the core cultures of large companies has always been a daunting challenge. In these times when change is accelerating, culture is seldom on the front burner.

It is a bit unfair for me to judge. I know Salesforce far better than I know Oracle. But I have visited both companies. Generally speaking Salesforce employees seem to be younger and far more comfortable working and socializing in social networks. They seem more conversational, while Oracle people I speak with remain steadfastly on talking points.

This is very important, owing not so much to the newly-formed Salesforce Marketing group, as to the meteoric success of its product Chatter, which is one of the two leading enterprise social networks. It has made Salesforce and its customers a more conversational company. Oracle is rumored to be planning to announce a Chatter rival at OpenWorld, and Chatter’s most formidable existing rival, Yammer, was acquired a few months back by Microsoft, portending rivalries that are bound to escalate.

Salesforce has accelerated the social culture in its treatment of the Radian6 and Buddy Media acquisitions. Their teams have been allowed to remain almost entirely intact in their remotely based, old headquarters. And in LeBrun and Lazerow, they have two established and admired social media luminaries whose personal brands eclipse anyone at Oracle.

As I view this juxtaposition of market positions between the two historic rivals, Oracle must now chase Salesforce as Salesforce once required to chase Oracle. In the coming years the winner in enterprise social marketing may be the one who takes all–or at least the larger market share.

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Talking to CIO’s, the money that was cut in the late 2000′s isn’t coming back to IT for innovation. IT is stuck with the maintenance cost of thing like Oracle databases that are increasingly too slow to manage the 3 V’s of Big Data (and the 4th V…volatility).

Software as a Service and Platform as a Service will become the way the business gets what they want without having to engage an increasingly preoccupied and underfunded IT. Oracle and its IT supporters will definitely suffer from this trend.